The Open Philanthropy Project recommended a grant of $600,000 to Essie Justice Group for general support. Essie Justice Group organizes women with incarcerated loved ones for criminal justice reform, and plans to use this grant to wage a ground campaign against the bail industry led by women directly impacted by the money bail system.

This is a discretionary (formerly called “no-process”) grant. For discretionary grants, the grant investigator (in this case Chloe Cockburn, our Program Officer for Criminal Justice Reform) can recommend the grant without needing to go through our normal process of providing their reasoning, discussing with the team, and providing input on and review of our public page. These grants are limited to a relatively small proportion of our grantmaking, and some other stipulations apply to what types of grant are eligible. The overall aim is for us to be able to move forward on relatively small and low-risk grants, based purely on the judgment of a single staff member and with minimal delay.